


Starlight

by Sinna



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-08
Updated: 2013-03-08
Packaged: 2017-12-04 15:06:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/712096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sinna/pseuds/Sinna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes Jehan can’t help but remember how the Earth burned. Those are the times when his friends are the only thing keeping him anchored.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Starlight

**Author's Note:**

> -This is the start of a possibly massive Les Mis Sci-Fi AU  
> -The poem quoted in the beginning is Henry Van Dyke’s Stars and the Soul. The poem at the end is by me.

Jehan sits quietly on the floor of a deserted hallway in the starship  _Patria’_ s lower deck, looking out the reinforced glass window as bright specks of light race past. Even now that mankind has colonized half the galaxy, there’s something mysterious and otherworldly about the stars.

_“Two things,” the wise man said, “fill me with awe:_ _/ The starry heavens and the moral law.”_ Jehan quotes under his breath.

Poems from old Earth have a tendency to find their way to his lips. They remind him of home. Of course, the Earth he had inhabited had been vastly different from Henry van Dyke’s nineteenth century world, but it had still been the same planet.

The planet that hasn’t been there for centuries now.

Jehan alone still remembers those terrifying last days. So many people struggling to escape on so few ships. The nights had been brilliant with the reflected light of the comet no scientist had anticipated. It was supposed to pass harmlessly by. They didn’t find the miscalculation in their formulas until far too late. Science had still been in its early stages, and contact with other worlds had been nonexistent. Martial law had to be established. Those with money bribed their way onto the five massive spaceships. Those with valuable talents – talents like poetry – were given the remaining slots.

He hadn’t wanted to go. The soldiers had dragged him kicking and screaming away from his family. He could still see his mother’s tearful smile and six-year-old Lily’s confusion as she asked why the mean people were taking her brother.

(They should have taken her instead. She could have written beautiful poetry about old earth and faint memories of an older brother.)

He’d been told that he was lucky. That he should be grateful for this opportunity. What a joke. Lucky to be torn away from the only home he’d ever known. Grateful to be sent hurtling into space locked in a cryogenic sleep.

He hadn’t woken up for five centuries.

He hadn’t figured that out immediately. The first thing he’d known after they put him under had been loud screeching in an unfamiliar language. Opening his eyes to find himself surrounded by distinctly non-human blue creatures. Naturally, he’d done the only sensible thing: grabbed the nearest piece of equipment and attacked his rescuers. He’d gone down rather quickly. The Galactic Union had apparently had a ton of fun dealing with the repercussions of that incident. The Nt’algr were a peace-loving race, but even they got a bit testy when attacked by a human who they had just rescued from a damaged and seemingly derelict spaceship – the only cryo passenger still alive.

Jehan had spent three months in limbo while the Galactic Union negotiated his release. He’d had been grateful, until he’d discovered that they classified him as a ‘Living Relic of Old Earth’ and expected him to sit in captivity like some pretty pet. He might as well have been wearing a collar with his name on it. The Galactic Union was no different from the government that had torn him away from his family all those years ago.

So he had run. He hadn’t known a thing about the universe he’d been thrown into, so much more advanced than the one he knew. But he had known that he had to escape the hold of the oppressive government holding him captive. He probably would have been found and dragged back if it hadn’t been for Enjolras.

It was pure luck that Enjolras, a discontented student interning on New Earth, was the first to find him. Or perhaps it was fate. Jehan had never questioned it. He had just accepted it when the golden-haired boy had told him, “Come with me and I’ll get you out of here.”

In the end, they’d stolen a ship to make their escape, joined by Enjolras’s fellow student, Combeferre.  _Patria_ had been beautiful back then, but not nearly as fast as she is now, with Feuilly’s modifications. She’d still been fast enough for them to escape. And somewhere along the way, they’d picked up their own band of merry men.

Slowly, the pain of losing Earth subsides as memories of his new friends – no, family – swarm his mind.

Speaking of…

“Hey.”

Jehan turns his face to smile as Courfeyrac approaches.

“Hello, Courfeyrac.”

“You looked upset. Are you okay?”

Courfeyrac kneels beside him, genuinely worried.

“I’m fine,” Jehan assures him. “Just considering some poetry. Can you think of a word that rhymes with tomorrow?”

“Sorrow?” Courfeyrac suggests.

Jehan shakes his head.

“No, that won’t do at all. It’s not a sad poem. Unless…” he trails off.

Courfeyrac smiles and pulls him into a hug. Jehan returns the embrace and thinks that maybe, just maybe, there’s a reason he’s here, now. His fingers itch to write, but he curls them tighter around Courfeyrac’s jacket and composes in his head.

_I want to catch tomorrow_

_in the palm of my hand_

_pack away sorrow_

_and find a new place to call_

_home_


End file.
